At the time of white settlement there were an estimated 250 distinct indigenous languages in Australia. Over half of these are no longer used. Many of those remaining are known to only a handful of elders and face obvious extinction without urgent steps being taken to record them [...] The 200 years since settlement is a minute fraction of the 40,000 year history of Australia’s native people. But within this tiny window of time, the devastation of an ancient culture and many of its languages has been brutally effective.

The Aboriginal Languages of Australia Virtual Library has compiled an impressive list of online resources available for the study and promotion of indiginous Australian languages. As of the most recent update (May 2005), there are 224 links to vetted resources grouped by type of resource, language, and Australian state. In all, about 70 languages are represented. Links are checked twice a year by the editor, David Nathan, who is also keeping tabs on sites that have gone offline (see his "Practice Statement").

Not the program, of course, just the name. From now on it is to be known as Google Book Search. "Print" obviously struck a little too close to home with publishers and authors. On the company blog, they explain the shift in emphasis:

No, we don't think that this new name will change what some
folks think about this program. But we do believe it will help a lot of
people understand better what we're doing. We want to make all the
world's books discoverable and searchable online, and we hope this new
name will help keep everyone focused on that important goal.

Slate goes to college this week with a series of articles on higher education in America, among them a good piece by Robert S. Boynton that makes the case for academic blogging:

"...academic blogging represents the fruition, not a
betrayal, of the university's ideals. One might argue that blogging is
in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael
Oakshott once called "The Conversation of Mankind"—an endless,
thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of
our culture.

...might blogging be subversive precisely because it makes real
the very vision of intellectual life that the university has never
managed to achieve?"

The idea of blogging as a kind of service or outreach is just
beginning (maybe) to gain traction. But what about blogging as
scholarship? Most professor-bloggers I've spoken with consider blogging
an invaluable tool for working through ideas, for facilitating exchange
within and across disciplines. But it's all decidedly casual. And
that's part of what makes it such fun. But to gain acceptance in the
academy, there have to be standards. There have to be barriers to
entry. Traditionally, that's what peer review has been for. Can there
be some sort of peer review system for blogs?

Boynton has a few ideas about how something like this could work
(we're also wrestling with these questions on our back porch blog, Sidebar,
with the eventual aim of making some sort of formal proposal). Whatever
the technicalities, the approach should be to establish a middle path,
something like peer review, but not a literal transposition. Some way
to gauge and recognize the intellectual rigor of academic blogs without
compromising their refreshing immediacy and individuality -- without
crashing the party as it were.

There's already a sort of peer review going on among blog carnivals, the periodicals of the blogosphere. Carnivals are rotating showcases of exemplary blog writing in specific disciplines -- history, philosophy, science, education, and many, many more,
some quite eccentric. Like blogs, carnivals suffer from an unfortunate
coinage. But even with a snootier name -- blog symposiums maybe -- you
would never in a million years confuse them with an official-looking
peer review journal. Yet the carnivals practice peer review in its most
essential form: the gathering of one's fellows (in this case academics
and non-scholar enthusiasts alike) to collectively evaluate (ok,
perhaps "savor" is more appropriate) a range of intellectual labors in
a given area. Boynton:

In the end, peer review is just that: review by one's
peers. Any particular system should be judged by its efficiency and
efficacy, and not by the perceived prestige of the publication in which
the work appears.

If anything, blog-influenced practices like these might reclaim for
intellectuals the true spirit of peer review, which, as Harvard
University Press editor Lindsay Waters has argued, has been all but
outsourced to prestigious university presses and journals.
Experimenting with open-source methods of judgment—whether of straight
scholarship or academic blogs—might actually revitalize academic
writing.

It's unfortunate that the accepted avenues of academic publishing --
peer-reviewed journals and monographs -- purchase prestige and job
security usually at the expense of readership. It suggests an
institutional bias in the academy against public intellectualism and in
favor of kind of monastic seclusion (no doubt part of the legacy of
this last great medieval institution). Nowhere is this more apparent
than in the language of academic writing: opaque, convoluted, studded
with jargon, its total remoteness from ordinary human speech its surest
sign of the author's membership in the academic elite. [...]

November 11, 2005

... I really enjoyed Will Richardson’s
keynote, and I’m especially intrigued by his advocacy to teach students
“negotiated meaning.” Librarians are all about negotiated meaning, and
I think it’s a vital role we can be aggressive in filling. It was
heartbreaking to hear Will describe a scenario in which teachers and
students use RSS feeds of persistent searches in Google News or Yahoo
News, because he couldn’t tell them to use feeds from library resources
instead. We absolutely have to change this ...

What came through loud and clear at this conference (titled,
appropriately enough, “Shifting Worlds”) is that libraries need to
continue shifting to where their users are and need to become part of
their users’ online, trusted network. Nothing new for readers of this
blog, but as I said in my five minutes on the tech trends panel, this
is the year libraries finally started doing this and doing it well.
Libraries can finally participate using free tools, we have some great
models, let’s get to it.

The highlight of the ARL meeting was a valedictory speech by William Bowen, President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He spoke about Portico
(a Mellon initiative to create a long-term archive for e-journals and
other digital resources) and other Mellon initiatives. His speech
covered the history and trajectory of the Mellon initiatives that have
spun off as independent entities - JSTOR, ARTstor, Ithaka, and Portico. For me the most interesting bits of the talk were his high-level
concluding observations which he titled “From 36,000 feet”. I’d urge
you to take a look at them. These concluding remarks are important
observations for our community even without knowing the Mellon context.
Read them.

The highlight of the Managing Digital Assets
forum was the opening keynote by Don Waters (Program Officer, Scholarly
Communications, Mellon Foundation) ... The most recent version of the talk is now on
the ARL server.

Some things that struck me in hearing this
version of the speech were the decisiveness with which a future for
Open Access journal publishing was dismissed, the firmness in his
conclusion that scholarly information resources must be aggregated to
fulfill their digital potential, and the absolute conviction with which
he warned institutions that they will need to get comfortable with
“outsourcing” what they used to hold closely. This last point echoed
some of Bill Bowen’s comments during the earlier meeting about the need
to get past library and institutional thinking to consideration of
system-wide issues and solutions. And as Don made his points he also
made it clear that the secrecy and nature of the deals struck by the
Google5 universities may represent a squandering of the public trust
that they built up over many decades ...

Jim concludes that "the LAM [Libraries, Archives and Museums] community is in danger of
using up all its good words. We’ve devalued (or had devalued by others)
pretty much all the ones that are useful - library, archive,
repository, asset, etc. Substantive interactions on these topics now
need to be prefaced by a vocabulary calibration which will then be good only for the duration of that discussion."

And on 'the need to get past library and institutional thinking', "the call for system-wide action which echoed across the
meeting days does not necessarily require new organizations or
institutions. There are a number already on the landscape that are, in
fact, controlled by the community. With leadership, will, and perhaps a
bit of funding, these organizations can effectively discharge some of
the requirements for the future that the community is now identifying." [Read the complete post]

October 21, 2005

Is there any overlap between fans of Vincent van Gogh’s drawings and the 21st-century art of podcasting? Who knows! But if there is, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is ready. Visitors to the museum’s website can download, for free, a 16-minute podcast of excerpts from van Gogh’s fabulous letters, read by actor Kevin Bacon. The audio feature can also be downloaded from iTunes, or heard on the museum’s audio guide, which can be rented for $6.